APAC SMBs hesitant to embrace digital platforms: Accenture report

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Small and medium-sized businesses in Asia-Pacific are hesitant to embrace digital tools, citing issues including inadequate support, high costs and complexity as leading barriers to adoption, according to a new report from Accenture.

Even though consumers are active users of online platforms, two-thirds (68 percent) of the SMBs surveyed do not plan to increase digital spending for sales, marketing, customer service or e-commerce tools; among them, one in six (17 percent) is actually planning to decrease their digital spending in these areas. This is despite the fact that there are more than 500 million active mobile payment users in China and digital transactions in Indonesia nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2017, according to the report.

“SMBs are the world’s most powerful growth engine and make up 98 percent of all businesses in China, Indonesia and Japan,” said James Kim, managing director of Accenture’s Software & Platforms industry practice in Asia-Pacific. “For platform companies, this presents a potential market opportunity in Asia-Pacific. Creating successful outcomes for SMBs will require helping them overcome perceived barriers to adopting digital platforms.”

Nearly half (45 percent) of all respondents also identified privacy and security concerns as a top barrier to adopting digital platforms. Other concerns included lack of customer support for marketing tools (cited by 44 percent of respondents), uncertainty with the relevancy of data analytics (38 percent), and high service charges for payment tools (37 percent), among others.

When the non-digital SMBs were asked why they hadn’t yet adopted digital platforms, nearly three-quarters (72 percent) cited uncertainty about whether digital platforms would help their business, two-thirds (65 percent) cited the expense and difficultly of implementing and maintaining the platforms, and more than half (55 percent) cited their lack of skills and experience needed to manage digital platforms.